Y’all know I love a good barter. What I hate is shopping. Malls make me cry, and Wal*Mart makes me hyperventilate.

Over the years, however, I have managed to get my Christmas shopping down to a stress-free science. My goal is to give Christmas gifts that are full of love and joy, that support the local economy as much as possible, and that recognize who the recipient is and what they need and appreciate. Pardon my bragging, but yes, I can do this without ever setting foot in a mall or a big-box store.

My approach changes slightly every year. Always there are the homemade jams, and in more recent years I have added knitting. This year, however, I actually did go somewhere. I walked two doors down, to my neighbor Emily’s house. Talk about keeping it local!

Genius at Work

Earlier this year, Emily decided to do what she does best. In the past, she has been an excellent teacher, and briefly she was an advocate for families of children with learning disabilities in a law practice, but Emily’s true gift is at the sewing table. I have never known anyone with her eye for bringing together color, texture, and pattern in completely new and beautiful ways.

Today the mother of three really cute children, Emily learned to sew years ago as a newlywed living in rural New Mexico, worlds away from anything like the neighborhood where we live now — where our houses sit a few feet apart and where we don’t hesitate to walk into one another’s homes to borrow milk, pine nuts, a glass of wine, a can of tomatoes or beans. I love this about my little street in Decatur. We have impromptu parties all the time. We are all up in one another’s business, and it’s great. This village is my family.

I have had a front-row view of Emily’s process of turning a self-taught hobby into a cottage industry (literally — she sews in the front room of her cottage). Baby clothes, coffee cozies, lavender-scented eye masks, teddy bears, fabric-covered journals, shoulder bags — stuff just started pouring out of her sewing machine and filling up her house. So she secured a booth at a local arts fair last spring and started selling it. Then she did it again at another crafts fair. Suddenly, her business was taking off.

I said, “Emily, you need a website.”

So one night last summer over a glass of wine, she and I worked out a barter — a website for her in exchange for Christmas shopping for me.